“Fine.” Fallon looked around, taking in the shelves of canned goods, the small freezer section and the bins of bulk nuts and grains. “Where’s Isabella?”
“Haven’t seen her yet this morning.” Harriet put down the magazine. “Expect she’s over at the cafe having coffee with Marge and Violet and Patty. Everyone in town wants to know how Cinderella got on at the ball.”
“What ball?”
“That would be the one which required a fancy dress and glass slippers.”
“What are you talking about?” Fallon headed for the door. “Never mind. I don’t have time now.”
He went outside and cut back across town to the Sunshine. When he yanked open the door, Marge, Violet and Patty stared at him.
“Where’s Isabella?” he asked.
Marge frowned. “She left a while ago. Said she was going to pick up the mail.”
Fallon went cold. “She never made it to the grocery store.”
Violet smiled. “Take it easy. She said she was going to check up on Walker first. She was a little worried about him for some reason.”
“Son of a bitch.”
He broke into a run, heading toward Walker’s cabin on the bluffs. He was dimly aware of Marge, Violet and Patty following him. Other people peered curiously out of doorways and shop windows.
When he went past the Scar, Oliver Hitchcock came out of the front door.
“Hey, Jones, what’s up?” he shouted.
“Isabella,” Fallon said. “She’s in trouble.”
The crack of thunder and the flash of lightning announced the rain.
By the time he reached Walker’s cabin, he was thoroughly soaked. He did not feel the cold. An icy psi fever was burning in him.
He went up the steps and pounded on the door.
“Isabella. Walker. Open the damn door.”
There was no response. He was about to kick in the door when he discovered that it was unlocked.
The utter emptiness of the interior of the cabin gave off the ominous vibes of violence. He could feel it in his bones. He wanted to howl his rage into the teeth of the storm, but he made himself take a couple of minutes to search the cabin.
Footprints told part of the story. Isabella had entered the cabin. He could see her small, muddy prints on the floor. Two people in running shoes had entered through the back door, gone down the hall to the bathroom and then returned to the front room.
He went out through the kitchen into the backyard. Fresh tire tracks yielded more information. Walker did not own a car. The heavy tread belonged to an SUV.
He had missed something, he was sure of it. The fever searing his blood was making him careless. He had to stop and think or he would not stand a chance in hell of helping Isabella.
He went back into the cabin and stood quietly for a moment, opening his senses without trying to focus. The residue of some familiar currents of energy shivered in the atmosphere. He recognized them. One of the missing Victorian gadgets. That was how they had grabbed Isabella.
He saw the corner of the business card sticking out from under the rug. He picked it up. The name on the card confirmed his theory of the case.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered again.
He finally became aware of the small crowd forming on the front porch of the cabin. He looked through the open door and saw that half the town had followed him.
Henry stepped forward. “What’s wrong, Jones? What happened to Isabella and Walker?”
“They’ve been kidnapped,” Fallon said.
The knot of people stared at him, dumbfounded.
“Who would want to kidnap Walker and Isabella?” Marge demanded. “It’s not like they’re rich. There’s no one to pay a ransom.”
“This isn’t about money,” Fallon said. “It’s about those damn Bridewell curiosities. Walker must have seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. I think Isabella was in the wrong place at the wrong time, so she was taken, too.”
“It wasn’t an accident that they took her,” Patty said. “She had a feeling that Walker was in trouble. That’s why she came here today to check on him. She thought maybe he was ill.”
“What do we do now?” Violet asked. “Call the cops? It will take hours for them to get here, assuming they will even take a missing persons call seriously.”
“I know who took Walker and Isabella,” Fallon said. “Odds are they are still alive and will stay that way until nightfall. The person who is behind this has been very careful about not leaving any evidence. There’s no reason she would change her pattern now. She’s got a companion, someone to do the heavy lifting. They’ll wait until dark and then they’ll do what we plan to do with Lasher’s skeleton.”
“Dump them into the ocean?” Marge asked, horrified.
“Yes,” Fallon said. “They won’t want to drive far with a couple of kidnap victims in the back of an SUV. Too much risk of being pulled over by a cop. They’ll stash Walker and Isabella somewhere until it’s safe to get rid of them.”
Marge looked at him, her face deeply shadowed with anxiety. “You keep saying she. You think that a woman took Isabella and Walker?”
“Her real name is Dr. Sylvia Tremont,” Fallon said. “She’s a curator at the Arcane museum in L.A. Everyone thinks she’s on sabbatical in London. She’s not. She’s working real estate over in Willow Creek under the name Norma Spaulding.”
33
Spaulding Properties was housed in a quaint, weathered commercial building on the main street of Willow Creek. The “Closed” sign showed in the window. Fallon walked past the entrance without pausing, as though he were headed to the drugstore on the corner.
When he reached the narrow strip of muddy grass that separated the premises of the real estate business from the restaurant next door, he turned quickly and went around to the back door of Spaulding Properties.
The rear door was locked, but that did not come as a surprise. Fallon reached inside his jacket and removed one of the electronic lock picks that he handed out like candy to J&J agents. It took less than three seconds to open the door. Whatever secrets Sylvia Tremont was hiding, she was not concealing them inside the office.
The back room of Spaulding Properties was remarkably uncluttered. There were no reams of paper, no stacks of printed brochures or any business machines. It had taken less than two minutes on the computer to discover that Norma Spaulding had not closed a sale in the four weeks that the office had been open.
He moved into the main room. The lack of sales had not stopped a few desperate homeowners from listing their properties with Spaulding Properties. Unappealing photos of a handful of aged cabins and the old Zander mansion adorned the wall.
He disregarded the mansion because, although it was no longer an active crime scene, it had become a grisly attraction for tourists and thrill seekers. It would not make a good place to hold Isabella and Walker.
He slipped into his other senses and studied the half-dozen featured listings with the cold-blooded logic of a killer. Swiftly he calculated distances from Walker’s house, the degree of geographical isolation offered by the various properties and the proximity to the two locations in the area that provided the kind of powerful, reliable currents required to drag two bodies out to sea and make sure that the evidence disappeared.
Tremont would not use the Point, he concluded. It was too close to Scargill Cove. There was a serious risk that someone in town would see her and her companion, even in the midst of a storm. That left the second location, the blowhole site. The surf was violent there, and the currents were extreme. In the summer it was a
